The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Ix Part 1

The German Cla.s.sics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

Vol. IX.

by Various.

THE LIFE OF FRIEDRICH HEBBEL

By WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD, A.M.,

a.s.sistant Professor of German, Harvard University

The greatest German dramatists of the middle of the nineteenth century were Franz Grillparzer, Friedrich Hebbel, and Otto Ludwig. In a caustic epigram written in 1855, Grillparzer set forth that Dame Poetry, for some years a widow and now ailing, needed a husband, but could find none; and we remember that the heroine of _Libussa_ rejects the wise Lapak, the strong Biwoy, and the rich Domaslaw because she desires in one man, united, the qualities which separately dominate the three. With more charity, Grillparzer might have more fully recognized the poet in Hebbel or Ludwig; but we may be permitted to think of these three dramatists as not unlike the three suitors for the hand of Libussa: Grillparzer was rich, Ludwig was wise, and Hebbel was strong. Each of them was somewhat deficient in the qualities of the other two; each, however, was a personality, and Hebbel one of the most powerful that ever lived.

Hebbel's career is a long battle against all but insuperable obstacles.

Born at Wesselburen in the present province of Schleswig-Holstein on March 18, 1813, he was the son of a poor stone mason--so poor that, as Hebbel said, poverty had taken the place of his soul. Though Klaus Hebbel was a well-meaning man, he was a slave to the inexorable _non possumus_ of penury. In winter, especially, lack of work made even the provision of daily bread often difficult and sometimes impossible for him. But Friedrich Hebbel's childhood, full of hards.h.i.+p as it was, was not cheerless. The father did what he could; and the mother, at whatever sacrifice to herself, could nearly always do something for the children.

The greatest hards.h.i.+p was caused by the father's hostility to these maternal concessions to childish desires; for to him, whose life was labor, unproductive use of time was a crime. He thought it a matter of course that his son should become a laboring man like himself, and it is little less than a miracle that this did not happen. The mother, to be sure, fostered the boy's more ambitious hopes; the death of the father in Hebbel's fourteenth year was perhaps a blessing in disguise; undoubtedly the happiest chance in Hebbel's boyhood, so far as external events are concerned, was the fact that he won the favor of a real teacher in his schoolmaster Dethlefsen, who not only gave his education the proper start, but also recommended him, as his best scholar, to the local magistrate, J.J. Mohr.

For nearly eight years (1827 to 1835) Hebbel was in Mohr's employ, first as an errand boy, and ultimately as a clerk, to whom more and more official business was intrusted. He lived in the household of his superior, continued in the magistrate's library the a.s.siduous reading which he had begun with Dethlefsen's books, and acquired, along with the habits of official accuracy, something of the ways of a higher social station than that to which he had been born. His contact with the world of affairs and with litigation also considerably broadened his outlook, though it was often the seamy side of life that he saw, and his own early necessities had sharpened his sense of the essential tragedy of existence. Among the young people of the town Hebbel was as active and inventive as any; he wrote verses, took part in amateur theatricals, and was a leader in many undertakings that had not amus.e.m.e.nt as their sole object.

From the beginning Hebbel shows extraordinary sensitiveness to esthetic appeal and a disposition to dreamy imaginativeness. The Bible, the Protestant hymnal, pre-cla.s.sical prose and poetry of the eighteenth century, as well as contemporary romantic fiction, including Jean Paul, Hoffmann, and Heine, touched his fancy and stirred him to emulation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRIEDRICH HEBBEL]

As a boy, he is said to have composed a tragedy _Evolia, the Captain of Robbers_, which his mother confiscated and burned. His early poems are echoes of Klopstock, Matthisson, Holty, Burger, and other predecessors; but especially of Schiller, whose moral seriousness and sonorous language alike inspired the serious and rhetorically gifted youth. The influence of Schiller, however, marks no epoch in the poetic development of Hebbel; it dominates the period of adolescence. The sense of poetry was aroused in him as a boy, he said, by Paul Gerhardt's hymn "The woods are now at rest" (_Nun ruhen alle Wlder_); the discovery of what poetry is he made in 1830, when he read Uhland's _Minstrel's Curse_ and perceived that the sole principle of art is not to write, like Schiller, eloquently about ideas, but "to make in a particular phenomenon the universal intuitively perceptible."

Having published poems and stories from 1829 on in a local newspaper, Hebbel, in 1831, seeking a wider audience at the same time that he longed for a larger sphere of activity, submitted specimens of his work to Amalie Schoppe in Hamburg, the editress of a fas.h.i.+on paper; and in this and the following years she printed a considerable number of his productions. Moreover, she took a genuine personal interest in his ambitions; and after several plans had proved abortive, she succeeded in collecting for him a small sum of money and the promise of other material aid in a plan that should give a firm foundation for the structure of his hopes: he should come to Hamburg and prepare for the study of law. Accordingly, on the fourteenth of February, 1835, he left his modest but secure position in Wesselburen for the alluring great world where he felt that he belonged, but where he was destined to toil and to suffer, in a struggle for existence which only a hardy North-German peasant could have endured.

Hebbel came to Hamburg as a young man of twenty-two, far ahead of his years in knowledge, judgment, and capacity, but still unacquainted with rudimentary things belonging to higher education, such as Latin grammar.

He could not find the right tone in dealing with his benefactors, and he suffered unspeakable humiliation in the conflict of a proud and independent spirit with the subjection which inconsiderate well-wishers imposed upon him. He learned more by private reading and by a.s.sociation with students in a Scientific Society than he learned in school; and to one woman, Elise Lensing, who became his friend and angel of mercy, he owed more than to the whole aggregation of those who gave him money and meals. Somewhat more than eight years his senior, in respect to experience of the world and training in the finer graces of life his superior, she aided, encouraged, and loved him, well aware that his feeling for her was, at the most, admiration and grat.i.tude, and that the intimate union and companions.h.i.+p which soon became for him an indispensable solace could never lead to marriage.

In Hamburg Hebbel began the diary which, continued throughout his life, is the most valuable source of information about him that we have, and which, being the repository of his meditations as well as the record of his experiences, is one of the most remarkable doc.u.ments of the kind ever composed. He wrote and published a number of poems, and began several short stories. More significant, however, was the development of his critical faculty, which found in the Scientific Society a free field for exercise. Here, on the twenty-eighth of July, 1835, Hebbel read a paper on Theodor Korner and Heinrich von Kleist which, in spite of a rather juvenile tone, shows a maturity of insight quite unparalleled in the critical literature of that day. It is greatly to Hebbel's credit, and was to his profit, as the sequel showed, that against the opinion of his generation he could demonstrate the poetic excellence of Kleist and could distinguish in Korner between the heroic patriot and the mediocre poet; for it was a dramatic masterpiece that Hebbel a.n.a.lyzed in Kleist's _Prince of Hamburg_, and in this a.n.a.lysis he formulated views that remained the canons of all his subsequent activity as a playwright. The study of Kleist gave him for the drama the same sort of illumination that Uhland had given him for lyric poetry.

Though Hebbel was unable to acquire in Hamburg a certificate of preparedness for the university, he soon felt ready for university studies, and after some difficulty persuaded his benefactors to give him the balance of the fund that they had collected, and consent to his going to Heidelberg. In March, 1836, he departed thither, with less than eighty thalers in his pocket. He could be admitted only as a special student; nevertheless, he was hospitably received by members of the faculty of law, and attended their lectures. But the romantic scenery of Heidelberg, and, the reading of Goethe and Shakespeare, whom he now for the first time studied thoroughly, were more fruitful and suggestive to him than jurisprudence, however much he was interested in "cases" as examples of human experience. Such a "case" he treated in _Anna_, the first short story with which he was satisfied, and which indeed is worthy of his model in this _genre_, Kleist. Other narratives, and a few poems, testify to a closer approach to nature and a less morbid att.i.tude toward life than had appeared in the earlier works. Hebbel was now finis.h.i.+ng his apprentices.h.i.+p, wisely restraining the impulse to dramatize until in the less exacting forms he had mastered the means of expression. But everything pointed toward literature as a calling, and before the year was out Hebbel resolved to migrate to Munich, still, to be sure, a student, but from the moment of his arrival living there under the name and t.i.tle of _Literat_.

The journey to Munich Hebbel made afoot, leaving Heidelberg on September 12, 1836. He pa.s.sed through Stra.s.sburg, and thought of Goethe as he climbed the tower of the cathedral; he visited the Suabian poets at Stuttgart and Tubingen, and was deeply disappointed with the kindly but undemonstrative Uhland; and he reached Munich on September the twenty-ninth. Here he remained until March, 1839.

Hebbel's two and a half years in Munich, years of solitude, unheard-of privation, illness, and battling against despair, came near to wearing out the physical man, and were, through long-continued insufficient nourishment, the cause of the disease to which he finally succ.u.mbed; but they were also the finis.h.i.+ng school of the personality that henceforth unflinchingly faced the world and demanded to be heard. Hebbel provided for his material needs partly by journalistic work, to which he was ill-adapted, but chiefly through the limitless bounty of Elise Lensing--for months at a time the only being with whom, and only by correspondence, he had human intercourse. He heard the lectures of Sch.e.l.ling and Gorres at the university; but, as at Heidelberg, he, gained most by prodigious reading in literature, history; and philosophy. His savage melancholy found relief in grimly humorous narratives and gloomy poems. At the time of his greatest wretchedness he conceived the plots of comedies, "ridiculing something by the representation of nothing." But we note that his reading now begins to suggest to him innumerable subjects for tragedies, such as Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julian the Apostate, the Maid of Orleans, Judith and Holofernes, Golo and Genoveva,--all of them characters the key to whose destiny lay in their personalities, and in whom Hebbel saw the destiny of mankind typified. Still more directly, however, the tragedy of human life was brought home to him--not merely through his personal struggle for existence, but through the death of Emil Rousseau, a dear friend who had followed him from Heidelberg to Munich, the death of his mother, for whose necessities he had of late been able to do but little, and misfortune in the family of Anton Schwarz, a cabinet maker, with whose daughter, Beppy, Hebbel had been on too intimate terms. Hebbel's dramas _Judith_, _Genoveva_, and _Maria Magdalena_ all germinated during these terrible years of the sojourn in Munich.

But the actual output of these years was not large. Attempts to publish a volume of poems and a volume of short stories had failed.

Nevertheless, Hebbel was no longer an unknown quant.i.ty in the world of letters when, in the early spring of 1839, he decided to return to Hamburg. Hope of aid from Campe, Heine's publisher, and from Gutzkow, the editor of a paper published by Campe, encouraged this decision. But Hebbel was really going home, going back to Elise, after having accomplished the purpose of his pilgrimage, even though for lack of money he could not take with him a doctor's degree. He came as a man who could do things for which the world gives a man a living. The return journey, lasting from the eleventh to the thirty-first of March, 1839, amid alternate freezing and thawing, was a tramp, than which only the retreat from Moscow could have been more frightful; but Hebbel accomplished it, more concerned for the little dog that accompanied him than for his own sufferings. And it appeared that he had wisely chosen to return; for he found opportunity for critical work in Gutzkow's _Telegraph_, and Campe published the works which in rapid succession he now completed: _Judith_ (1840), _Genoveva_ (1841), _The Diamond_ (1841; printed in 1847), and _Poems_ (1842).

These publications won fame for Hebbel and yielded some immediate pecuniary gain. But although he had reached the goal of his ambition in having become a poet, and a dramatist whose first play had appeared on the stage, he still lacked a settled occupation and a sure income.

Having been born a Danish subject, he conceived the idea of a direct appeal to Christian VIII. of Denmark for such an appointment as the king might be persuaded to give him. In spite of the unacademic course of his studies and his lack of strictly professional training, he thought of a professors.h.i.+p of esthetics at Kiel. Even in those days, when professors.h.i.+ps could be had on easier terms than now, this was a wild dream. But Hebbel did not appeal to his sovereign in vain. He spent the winter of 1842-43 in Copenhagen, where the Danish-German dramatist Oehlenschlager smoothed his path to royal favor; and after two audiences with Christian VIII. he was granted a pension of six hundred thalers a year for two years, in order that by traveling he might learn more of the world and cultivate his poetic talents. His first expression of grat.i.tude for this privilege was the tragedy _Maria Magdalena_, begun at Hamburg in May, finished at Paris in December, 1843, and dedicated to the king.

Hebbel's departure for Paris, in September, 1843, did not mean for him what Heine's settlement there twelve years before had meant for Heine--the beginning of a new life. Hebbel's knowledge of French was very imperfect, and he was as much isolated in Paris as he had been in Munich; he did not seek stimulus from without so much as freedom to develop the ideas that were teeming in his mind. When he left Hamburg, however, he was destined never to return thither except as a visitor, and started on the long, roundabout way to an unforeseen new home in Vienna. He had been but little over a month in Paris when he learned of the death of the little son that Elise had borne him three years before.

He was deeply grieved both for himself and for the despairing mother, to whom he offered all the comfort he could give, not excepting marriage, as soon as he should ever be able to provide for her. In May, 1844, Elise bore him another son who, dying in 1847, was never seen by his father. Hebbel did not forget what he owed to the mother of his children, but he felt the debt more and more as an obligation, in the fulfilment of which there was no prospect of satisfaction to either.

Despite the fact that she had a hundred times declared to him that he was free, all her dreaming and planning tended solely to keep him bound.

He, who had been her pupil, had now far outgrown her capacity to understand his endeavors and achievements; and he felt that he could sacrifice much for her, but not himself, his personality, and his mission. And so the unwholesome relation wore on, with aggravating burdensomeness, to the inevitable crisis.

In the fall of 1844 Hebbel journeyed from Paris to Rome. He had met few notables in Paris--Heine, Felix Bamberg, and Arnold Ruge almost complete the tale--but in Italy he, like Goethe, made the acquaintance of a group of German artists, and followed their leaders.h.i.+p in the study of ancient art. He enjoyed this study in natural, unaffected appreciation of the beautiful; and a certain artistic polish distinguishes the poems which nature and art in Italy inspired him to write. The Italian journey, however, was far from being a renaissance to him as it had been to Goethe. Hebbel remained a Northern artist. Vesuvius impressed him, but Pompeii proved a disappointment; it was laid out, he said, like any other city. He departed from Rome in October, 1845, richer in the friends.h.i.+p of distinguished men--including Hermann Hettner--and in acc.u.mulated experience, but not as one to whom the _Ponte Molle_ is a bridge of sighs.

Hebbel's design was to return to Hamburg by way of Vienna. In Vienna, which he reached on the fourth of November, 1845, he was cordially received in literary circles. Men of influence promised their good offices in getting his plays performed, but failed to take effective measures, and he was about to continue his journey when the romantic enthusiasm of two young barons Zerboni gave him an _entree_ into aristocratic society, and he tarried. Ere long he had decided to stay for life. In Christine Enghaus, the leading lady at the _Hofburgtheater_, he found the feminine counterpart to his masculine nature; and on the twenty-sixth of May, 1846, they were married.

From every point of view this marriage proved so perfect that we may well question whether anything whatever ought to have been allowed to stand in the way of it. To Elise, of course, it seemed an outrage--the more so that she was entirely mistaken as to the character of Christine; and with furious bitterness she reproached Hebbel for violating her most sacred rights in his infatuation for an actress. The storm broke, but it cleared the air for both; and upon the death of her second son in 1847, Elise came at Christine's invitation to Vienna and spent a year in the Hebbel household.

Hebbel himself rightly dated an epoch in his life from his marriage and the renewed productivity which followed upon it. He enjoyed now for the first time not only freedom from economic worries but also complete serenity of mind. Outwardly, indeed, he still had to keep up his offensive and defensive warfare. Beyond the circle of his immediate adherents, only the more enlightened of his contemporaries, such as Ruge, Hettner, and Theodor Vischer, perceived what he was aiming at, and his own public discussions were so abstruse and repellent that it is no wonder they were misunderstood. Grillparzer declared that he was groping in esthetic fog. Julian Schmidt recognized his power and the poetic charm of many of his pa.s.sages, but thought him in danger of crossing the line which separates sense from nonsense, genius from insanity. Hebbel was restive under criticism, and the method of his polemics tended rather to exasperate than to conciliate his adversaries. Meanwhile _Maria Magdalena_ and _Judith_ were performed at the _Hofburgtheater_, with Christine as the heroine. But in 1850 Heinrich Laube became director of this theatre, and he not only rejected one play of Hebbel's after another, but also withdrew from Christine the leading parts which she had heretofore taken in the regular repertory.

The new epoch in Hebbel's dramatic activity really began in 1848. The fruits of his sojourn in Italy, _A Tragedy in Sicily_ (1846), _Julia_ (1847), and _New Poems_ (published in 1847) were mediocre stragglers in the train of his first successes. But _Herodes and Mariamne_, begun in 1847 and completed in November, 1848, is the first of a new series of masterpieces. Mariamne, Hebbel said, was not simply written for Christine, she _was_ Christine. _The Ruby_, which followed in the spring of 1849, is a graceful dramatization of a fairy-tale written ten years before in Munich; _Michel Angelo_ (1850), a satire on his critics, is a slight but clever refutation of ignorant presumption. _Agnes Bernauer_ (1851) is a worthy successor of _Herodes and Mariamne_; _Gyges and his Ring_ (1854) is the most poetic and perhaps the most characteristic of his dramas. The trilogy on the _Nibelungen_ (1855-1860) was Hebbel's last great work, ranking with Grillparzer's _Golden Fleece_ and Schiller's _Wallenstein_; and if he had lived to complete _Demetrius_, we should have had another remarkable drama, on a subject which Schiller too was destined to leave unfinished.

In the fifties, Hebbel accompanied Christine on professional trips to North Germany, and had ample occasion to observe the spread of his influence. In 1852 he was feted at Munich in connection with the production there of _Agnes Bernauer_. In 1858 he attended a performance of _Genoveva_ in Weimar, and was decorated with an order by the Grand Duke. In 1861 the Nibelungen trilogy was performed for the first time in Weimar, with Christine as Brunhild and Kriemhild; and in the following year Hebbel, who had even thought of going to live at Weimar, was the guest of the Grand Duke at his castle in Wilhelmsthal. Though in Vienna honors came later, Hebbel felt himself to be during these years at the summit of his existence. In 1855 he bought a country home at Orth near Gmunden in the Salzkammergut, and to the idyllic atmosphere of that retreat he owed the inspiration for the epic poem _Mother and Child_ (1857), his gentlest treatment of a tragic theme. In 1857 he issued a definitive edition of his _Poems_, dedicated to Uhland, "the first poet of the present time." In 1854 _Genoveva_, in modified form, was successfully presented as _Magellone_ at the _Burgtheater_, with Christine as the heroine. But Hebbel's first Viennese triumph did not come until February 19, 1863, when Christine played Brunhild in the first and second parts of the _Nibelungen_. On his deathbed he received the news that the Berlin Schiller Prize had been awarded to him for the _Nibelungen_. Hebbel died on the thirteenth of December, 1863. Christine out-lived him by nearly half a century, until the twenty-ninth of June, 1910.

Rightly or wrongly, Hebbel regarded himself as the creator of a new form of drama, setting in at a step beyond Shakespeare and Schiller, and attacking problems in the manner suggested, but not fully developed, by Goethe. Shakespeare and Schiller, he said, locate the conflict in the breast of the hero: shall he, or shall he not, endeavor to attain the object of his desire, against forces which oppose him from without, and which have their allies in his own conscience, in his own sense of right and wrong? He desires the wrong, or neglects the right, and for his tragic fault atones with death. We pity the unfortunate individual, console ourselves, however, with the inviolability of the moral law, and profit by his example: only those are free whose will chooses to be moral. But Goethe, in the dramatically conceived _Elective Affinities_, focuses attention not upon the doings of individuals, but upon the sanctions of the law which a power superior to their wills forces them to break. And so Hebbel, pa.s.sing over the individual, as one of myriads, directs inquiry into the causes that make him what he is, that make him do what he does, that prevent him from doing what at the same time they impel him to attempt; and he reveals, back of the individual typical phenomenon, an irreconcilable conflict in the very condition and definition of its existence. This conflict has its roots in the dualism of all being.

The corner-stone of Martin Luther's system of morals was the paradox: "A Christian is a sovereign lord over all things, and is subject to n.o.body; a Christian is a duty-bound servant of all things, and is subject to everybody." In other words, a man's soul is his own and is superior to all the things of the flesh; but through his body he is made dependent upon the life-giving earth, and subject to the laws which those other "bodies" in the community in which he lives make for the common defense and the general welfare. Hebbel carried the ant.i.thesis farther, asking what is the soul, and what is the body? And he answered, in effect, that the soul is indeed the very essence of personality, but is no original, self-begotten, and self-sufficient ent.i.ty--on the contrary, it is a fragment, a partic.i.p.ant in the animating principle of the universe--and that the body is indeed the medium of contact between person and person, but is also the separating barrier of soul from soul, and of the individual soul from the soul of the world. The body is the form or vessel which vouchsafes to the soul individual existence, and which the soul, by its very impulse to activity, wears out and destroys. Birth is a prophecy of destruction and a doom to death.

But life is activity, the soul is a motive force, self-a.s.sertion and self-preservation are heaven's first law. Self-a.s.sertion, however, is nothing but the operation of communicated and committed animation, and self-preservation nothing but the postponement of the day of surrender.

Self-preservation is impossible; self-a.s.sertion is a challenge to the a.s.sertiveness of other selves, as well as a hastener of dissolution. The self follows its native bent, and its native impulse is for expansion; but it thus, as a fraction, leaves, on its centrifugal path, the course of the great world spirit from which it separates; and as both a separate ent.i.ty and a member of a community it must, in its attempt at self-realization, meet the constraint which the community, whose only object is likewise self-realization and self-preservation, puts upon all within its power. The law is negative and repressive, self-interest is positive and a.s.sertive; between the two there is no possible reconciliation--at most a compromise--so that in the last a.n.a.lysis it appears that the a.s.sertion of individual will as such is immoral, that is, contrary to the will of the community; and is sinful, for it is not the will of G.o.d, but the will of a particularized individual, however G.o.dly he may be. There are differences in degree, but not in kind, among immoralities and sins, with corresponding degrees of punitive repression; but the potential tragic conflict is constant, and there is as little doubt about the eminent domain of the State as about the supremacy of G.o.d.

The laws of G.o.d are changeless and eternal, but human morality is a local and temporal development. As the character of an individual is the product of disposition and experience, so his fate is humanly determined by the particular forms of custom and law established in the community in which his lot is cast. But these change from time to time, and in periods of change the disparity between public and private interest is most conspicuous: the progressive individual bears not only the burden of proof but also the dead weight of public inertia. Only at infinity can the parallel ant.i.thetical interests coincide. Nevertheless, the world gradually effects self-correction by the evolution of new syntheses from the thesis and ant.i.thesis ever and anon presented for trial and judgment as between liberal and conservative forces.

Hebbel's drama, then, is the representation of a process, the process of life, by which things come into being. It reveals the individual in the making, and discusses the validity of the inst.i.tutions that condition his life or cause his death. There is no question of guilt and atonement. Protagonist and antagonist are right, each in his way and from his point of view; the conflict may arise from excess of goodness as well as from excess of evil; but the representative of the whole prevails of necessity over the champion of a single interest; and in the knowledge of this truth, rather than in the futile attempt to modify the relation, we must seek our freedom. Hebbel's plays are historical: character in its setting of circ.u.mstances is the only character really and fully comprehensible. They are sociological: exhibiting the ceaseless collision of individualistic and collectivistic tendencies, they teach forbearance, and patience, and the will to face the facts--_tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner_. And they are modern: treating problems of character and _milieu_, they disdain the advent.i.tious aids of eloquence and theatrical splendor, and speak to us with the directness, often with the bluntness, of nature herself. Hebbel was no naturalist, in the sense of one who seeks but to reproduce phenomena in all their details, sordid, trivial, or vulgar, if such they be. But through Ibsen, who esteemed him alone among his German predecessors, he became a factor in the recent naturalistic movement; and he might have saved it from many an aberration, if his example had been more closely followed.

Hebbel strikingly revealed his independence and originality at the beginning of his public career, by his new conception of old and familiar subjects. His Judith is a totally different person from the heroine of the Apocrypha. The Biblical Judith is a widow who slays a public enemy, and returns unscathed amid the plaudits of the mult.i.tude.

But Hebbel's Judith is a widow who has never been a wife, a woman who seems to have been appointed by Providence to do a great deed in His service, who takes the duty upon herself only to find that as a woman she is unequal to it; for as a woman she loves the manly heathen. She kills him, as she set out to do; but the motive for her act is personal revenge for a personal outrage; and she returns to Bethulia broken in spirit and appalled at the thought that she may bear a son by Holofernes. The attempt to make of herself an impersonal instrument in the hands of the Almighty--certainly a laudable undertaking--is her only fault, and is tragic because inconsistent with the character of womanhood, which the Almighty has also ordained. Compared with the iron necessity of her being, to which Judith succ.u.mbs, the accidental and improbable fault of Schiller's Maid of Orleans seems as trivial as it is conventional.

Similarly, in the conception of the story of Genoveva, Hebbel s.h.i.+fted attention from the saint to the sinner. In the centre of his _Genoveva_ stands Golo, the unfortunate young man whose good instincts are made criminal because the faults and errors of others excite them, and because his desire, justifiable according to nature, is directed toward a woman who is bound to another in a wedlock which, from the side of the husband at least, is only formally correct. In Golo's crime and atonement we accordingly see a great deal more than the operation of the moral law: we see how crime is begotten of innocence; and instead of thinking of the wretched creature, we think of the Creator who has so ordained it, and at whose central position in the moral universe there can be neither good nor evil, but an equilibrium of forces which become one or the other, and may become either when the equilibrium is disturbed. Good and evil, mutually exclusive qualities in the world of appearance, are, in the world of ideas, complementary conceptions, different aspects of one and the same thing.

Golo appears, despite his crimes, less guilty than Siegfried, the husband of Genoveva; and in his case a divine impulse, love, becomes an evil because it happens to collide with an inst.i.tution, marriage, which we are here justified in calling human, since, though it has a social sanction, it lacks the evidence of divine approval. Clara, in _Maria Magdalena_, is chargeable with but the minimum of guilt, and perishes because, too honest and dutiful to safeguard her own interests in a stern and selfish community, she cannot otherwise preserve for her father that una.s.sailable reputation which is, in his imperfect ethics, the highest good. The tragedy in this play is the tragedy of pharisaical _bourgeois_ society itself. There is no collision between high and low, such as const.i.tuted the plot of the _tragedies bourgeoises_ of the eighteenth century--e.g., Lessing's _Emilia Galotti_, Schiller's _Cabal and Love_--but the stubborn hardness of the middle-cla.s.s society in its typical representative is unable to meet a crisis; and by the banishment, or the condemnation to suicide, of its most promising members, this society p.r.o.nounces its own doom. Altruism is contrary to the custom, that is, to the morals of this community, and for that reason is forbidden and suppressed.

Another community in which altruism is unusual and discredited is Judaea just before the birth of Christ. Herod the king is a masterful ruler and a benefactor; but the end justifies the means that he adopts, and he is no respecter of persons. He does not even respect the person of his wife. The love of Mariamne is the one sure rock upon which he can rest when the earthquake, threatening at every moment, comes to shatter his throne and engulf him. He loves her too with a pa.s.sion which dreams of union so perfect that death cannot break it, so perfect that one of them would wish to die at the moment when the soul of the other left the body. This is Mariamne's dream also, but Herod cannot trust her to fulfil it. Not once, but twice, upon going to the wars, he leaves orders that Mariamne shall be slain if he is killed; and these orders are an a.s.sa.s.sination of her soul. The community can execute an individual; but one individual can only a.s.sa.s.sinate another. In the ancient orient a wife was a precious possession, entirely subject to the will of her husband, and liable to be burned in his funeral pyre. Herod represents such an ancient, oriental point of view; but Judaea is on the eve of becoming occidental and modern. Herod represents the law and has the power to crush the insurgent personality of Mariamne: he has not the power to slay the infant Savior, nor to hinder the coming of the day when every human soul is known to be an object of divine concern.

That play of Hebbel's in which the dualism of all being is most conspicuously tragic is _Agnes Bernauer_. Agnes is the daughter of a barber and surgeon, and is so beautiful that she is commonly known as the angel of Augsburg. Albrecht, the son and sole heir of the reigning duke Ernst, comes to Augsburg, falls in love with her, and, in spite of friendly warning, marries her; for she has loved him at first sight, too. As persons, they do what is right for them to do; their marriage has been performed by a priest of the church; and they feel that it has divine sanction. But Albrecht is not an ordinary person; he is the heir to the throne, and public exigencies require that the succession shall be guaranteed. This marriage, however, is illegal--a board of incorruptible judges so finds it; it causes sedition and threatens interminable strife. Duke Ernst is deliberate and patient in dealing with the unprecedented case. He waits until he can wait no longer.

Albrecht will not give up Agnes, nor Agnes give up him; Ernst respects the sacrament of wedlock by which they are united, and only after two and a half years does he sign the warrant by which Agnes was duly condemned to death. Agnes dies in perfect innocence and constancy, a victim of social convention. But Albrecht, whose disregard of this convention was rebellion, and whose vengeance for his wife's death brings him to the point of parricide, is made to see, not merely because excommunication accompanies the ban of the empire on him as a rebel, but also because of the instructive words and actions of his father, that the social organization he has defied has itself a divine sanction, and that a prince, standing by common consent at the head of that organization, cannot with impunity undermine the basis of his sovereignty. Devotion to him is like loyalty to the national ensign. The ensign is nothing in itself, but it symbolizes the idea of the State; and the prince is also the representative of an idea, which he must continue to represent in its entirety, or he ceases to be the prince.

This lesson Albrecht learns when, like Kleist's _Prince of Homburg_, he is made judge in his own case, and when he perceives at the cost of what personal sacrifice his father has done his duty. The State prevails over Albrecht as it prevails over Agnes, whose only fault was that she did not immure her beauty in a nunnery.

The sanction of tradition and custom which Albrecht and Agnes could not break in _Agnes Bernauer_ Hebbel most impressively demonstrated in _Gyges and his Ring_. Kandaules, King of Lydia, is a rash innovator in both public and private life. He despises rusty swords and uncomfortable crowns, he means to do away with silly prejudices, and, like Herod, regarding his wife as a precious possession only, he procures for his friend Gyges an opportunity to see her unveiled. But she, an Indian princess, is, in Christine Hebbel's words, a convolution of veils; her veil is inseparable from herself; and the brutal violation of her modesty is a less forgivable crime than the taking of her life would be.

The wearing of a veil may be a foolish custom; but use and want hallow even the trivial. Half of our law is based upon precedent, and we are protected at every turn by unwritten law, which is nothing else than precedent. Mankind needs to repose in the security of this protection.

Woe to him, said Hebbel, who disturbs the sleep of the world! Changes must come, but rarely in the way of revolution.

The tragedy of the Nibelungen Hebbel approached somewhat differently from the other subjects that he treated. He had his own conception of the tragic content of the matter, of course; but he found that the author of the _Nibelungenlied_, a dramatist from head to foot, has so clearly presented the tragic aspects of the story that the modern dramatist need only make himself the interpreter of the medieval epic poet. Herewith Hebbel's trilogy is at once distinguished from such other modern treatments of the subject as Geibel's _Brunhild_ or Wagner's _Nibelungen Ring_. Geibel eliminated everything supernatural; Wagner made use chiefly of the Old Norse versions of the story; Hebbel, on the contrary, dramatized what he regarded as the significant content of the Middle High German poem, retaining its mythological, Christian, chivalrous, historical, and legendary elements. The mythological elements of the epic are indeed indistinct survivals of earlier ages.

Hebbel leaned somewhat upon Norse myths in his reproduction of them, though it was part of his plan to preserve a certain indistinctness and mystery in these undramatic presuppositions. Similarly, he made more of the element of Christianity than is made of it by the _Nibelungenlied_.

In both epic and drama the Burgundians are only formally Christian; the cardinal principles of heathen ethics, tribal loyalty and vengeance, are entirely unaffected by the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. In the play, however, the transition from one system to the other is much more strongly emphasized than in the poem. The heathen ethics lead to the mutual destruction of those who profess them, and out of the ruins of the old civilization a new world rises heralded by Theodoric of Verona, who accepts the sovereignty relinquished by Attila the Hun, "in His name who died on the cross."

The downfall of two peoples follows in the train of personal calamity.

Siegfried, foreordained by the ancient G.o.ds to become the husband of Brunhild, neglects in the adventurous days of youth to woo her, and undertakes for the price of Kriemhild's hand to secure her as a wife for Gunther. Hidden in his cloak of invisibility, he twice overcomes Brunhild, thereby committing against her the same kind of outrage as Herod's against Mariamne, and that of Gyges against Rhodope. Through no direct fault of Siegfried's the fraud is discovered; it is an offense to the queen, which insults the State. Gunther the king will not punish it, for he is under personal obligations to the offender; but he takes no effective measures to prevent punishment by Hagen, who, though his loyal motives are mixed with envy, acts within his rights as the prime minister. But Siegfried, being vulnerable in only one spot, cannot be challenged to open combat; he has to be slain by stealth; so that Hagen's act is not strictly to be called murder, and the Burgundians, even though their sense of solidarity should not require them to make common cause with him against Kriemhild, might with some show of reason confirm his oath that he is no murderer. Siegfried put himself outside the pale of humanity when he a.s.sumed the dragon's skin. Dragons are hunted to death. Only men are tried and executed.